Staff Product Researcher

About this role

ABOUT KOHO

We’re on a mission to make financial services better for every Canadian. That means no hidden fees, no predatory interest rates - just financial products designed to help our users spend smart, save more, and build real wealth. We’re a performance organization with a strong heart: we care deeply about outcomes, and everything ties back to our mission - to financially empower a generation of Canadians.

At KOHO, we’re not your average 9-5. We believe real impact comes from people who are trusted, empowered, and supported to do their best work - without sacrificing their lives to do it. We prioritize work-life integration, not just work-life balance. That means asynchronous collaboration, flexible hours, and a remote-first setup built around autonomy and high trust.

KOHO is entering its next chapter - leaner, smarter, more AI-integrated. We’re building for impact, not bureaucracy. If you thrive in environments that value clarity, ownership, and bold thinking, you’ll fit right in.

ABOUT THE ROLE

At KOHO, we’re building products that help Canadians make meaningful financial progress. As a Staff Product Researcher, you will play a leadership role on our Individual Contributor track, helping the organization better understand user needs, behaviours, motivations, and barriers across the full financial journey.

This is a highly strategic, hands-on role for someone who can move fluidly between deep discovery work and practice-building. You will partner closely with Product Design, Product Management, Engineering, Data, SLT and cross-functional stakeholders to shape what we build, why we build it, and how we know it matters.

You’ll bring human-centric thinking into the product development, with a primary focus on Generative Research, whilst building the systems for Evaluative research at scale. You’ll also help KOHO level up how research is run: improving our methods, systems, tooling, recruiting practices, and research operations so that insight can scale with the business.

We’re looking for someone who is equally excited by two things: influencing product strategy at a high level, and building the research foundations that allow teams to move faster with more conviction.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

- Lead high-impact research across multiple product areas, helping teams identify the right problems to solve and bringing clarity to complex opportunity spaces

- Support product strategy and roadmap decisions by uncovering user needs, behavioural patterns, unmet opportunities, and moments of friction across the end-to-end customer experience

- Define strong research questions, determine the right methods for the job, and execute studies with a high bar for quality, speed, and usefulness

- Use a range of methods such as in-depth interviews, usability studies, concept testing, surveys, diary studies, journey mapping, and foundational research

- Synthesize findings into clear narratives, actionable insights, frameworks, and recommendations that influence teams and leadership

- Help teams and leaders identify where qualitative insight, quantitative data, and market understanding should come together to inform product direction

- Partner closely with designers, product managers, engineers, data partners, product marketers and Leadership to ensure research is embedded into decision-making rather than treated as a downstream check

- Build the foundations of a scalable research practice at KOHO, including better rituals, templates, repositories, recruitment approaches, and ways of working

- Improve research operations and participant recruitment, helping KOHO create more reliable, repeatable ways to learn from users over time

- Mentor designers, product managers, and other cross-functional partners on research thinking, evidence quality, and user-centric decision-making

- Raise the quality of discovery across the organization by coaching teams to ask better questions, avoid confirmation bias, and connect evidence back to business and user outcomes

- Explore how AI-powered tools can responsibly accelerate research workflows such as synthesis, pattern detection, documentation, and knowledge sharing without compromising rigor or judgment

WHO YOU ARE

- You bring significant experience in product research for consumer-facing digital products, ideally in complex, high-ambiguity environments

- You have operated at a staff or senior-leadership IC level, influencing product strategy across multiple teams or domains

- You are excellent at framing messy problems, identifying what needs to be learned, and choosing the right research method based on the decision, timeline, and constraints

- You are deeply skilled in qualitative research and comfortable combining it with quantitative inputs when appropriate

- You know how to go from raw signal to strategic insight, and from strategic insight to practical action

- You communicate clearly and persuasively, adapting your storytelling to different audiences from product teams to executives

- You are highly collaborative and know how to build trust across disciplines while influencing without formal authority

- You care about craft, but you also care about systems. You don’t just deliver studies; you improve how research happens around you

- You are energized by building structure where it does not yet exist, whether that means improving research ops, establishing standards, or creating better tools and templates

- You are scrappy, thoughtful, and outcome-oriented. You know when to go deep, when to move fast, and how to balance rigor with momentum

- You are passionate about understanding real people and using that understanding to help build products that create meaningful value in their lives

- You are comfortable using modern AI tools to improve the speed and leverage of your work, while applying strong judgment around quality, privacy, and interpretation

NICE TO HAVE

- Experience in fintech, banking, cred

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